If Thoreau Were Alive He’d Be Shouting From The Rafters

Henry David Thoreau spent hours hiking in the woods near his small cabin on Walden Pond. “He figured out that the way to break through into his own way of doing things was to think as he walked,” explains biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

Walls, an English literature professor at Notre Dame, has spent her career studying Thoreau. Her new 615-page biography comes out Tuesday, coinciding with the 200 anniversary of his birth.